I’ve previously written blog posts and articles about some ethical dilemmas that face small businesses, particularly web companies, in the last few years, such as my posts about design theft particularly around websites copying our work. There’s another topic that I’ve now had some personal experience with; using trademarks or business names in advertising on Google results.

But first some quick background for those less web savvy. Google has a great system called AdWords, which we’ve worked with before, having used it for advertising both our business, as well as on behalf of a number of our clients. Basically, you can define what keywords and phrases you want to display your advertisement under, and craft an appropriate advertisement to show.

It’s all pay-per-click, so it’s low risk (if you know what you’re doing!), and can be great for short term promotions and the like.

Now, in the past, we’ve had clients become excited when you say they can choose the phrases the ad will appear under. For example, in our own case, we’ve used terms such as ‘Web design perth’, ‘website design perth’, ‘perth web design’ and so on.

It doesn’t take long for a few people to realise that you could do the nasty on a competitor by using their trademarks, business or product names as your target terms. Thankfully, this is where Google has a fairly good trademark policy in place. Not only is it unethical (which our clients normally quickly admit), it is against Google AdWords policy.

I’m not a lawyer, but it looks like it could be against Australian law, as claimed in that famous case a few years ago ‘Trading Post v ACCC‘, where the ACCC said that using a competitor’s trademark to target AdWords campaigns was considered misleading conduct.

So it came as somewhat a surprise recently to find out that two of our fellow Western Australian web design companies, “Perth Web Design” and “Position Me Online” are doing the same thing to us.

See the screen grab above – when you search on Google Australia for “bam creative” you’ll currently see two advertisements targeting a trademark and company name which Bam Creative Pty Ltd owns.

On one hand, it could be considered flattery they’d go to all that trouble to target people searching our company name, however on the other, people could say it could be called devious, misleading and possibly, illegal.

What do you think? Is this sort of advertising fair game or not? Comments welcome!

Tonight I had the great opportunity to speak at the City of Stirling’s ‘Mind Your Arts’ workshop series.

It’s always great to impart some knowledge, and although I seriously dislike the term ’social media expert’, it was fun speaking about how artists can use social media to promote their work and network with other creative minds.

The slides are below. Although they aren’t as useful without the verbal cues, I hope that you find something useful in them. Thanks to the team at City of Stirling for inviting me, and for those who attended; thanks for making me feel welcome and for all the great questions!

The websites I mention in the talk were

Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Blogging (such as Wordpress)

If you attended the workshop, I hope to see you trying out social media soon!

Christmas is just around the corner, and whether you celebrate it or not, the event happens to coincide nicely with the end of the calendar year — a great time to thank those who have supported your business over the last twelve months.

Not only that, but a well-timed Christmas message may end up reviving a waning business relationship. Given we’re halfway through November, we’d need to work fast to meet printing and postal deadlines, or alternatively, build an electronic Christmas message, if that’s preferred.

Let’s look at options. The traditional Christmas card is still well received. There are a few rules with these, though:

• Try to opt for your own professionally-designed company Christmas card, so that it’s unique to your business (and there’s no risk of a competitor sending the same image!)
• For the personal touch, hand-sign rather than print signatures in the card.
• It’s better to send earlier rather than later. Leaving it until December 20th isn’t a wise move. Ideally, the card should arrive in the first week of December.
• Cards should fly solo, rather than share the envelope with extra marketing material that makes the card less genuine.
• It’s fine to include a logo, but keep it small or put it on the back so that it’s not the main focus.
• If you must resort to off-the-shelf cards, buy them through a charity who uses the profits to help others.
• Consider a different concept, such as the products MOO offer, with varying shapes and an individual touch.

Electronic cards are great as well, and are considerably better for the environment. They do, however, suffer from low open rates, and may get read by people other than those it was actually intended for. Indeed, it’s possible less people will see it, compared to the paper versions which tend to sit in office reception areas, being read by all in the weeks leading up to the break.

If you do send an ecard, consider using email campaign software; it can provide a text version if required and track email open rates. There are plenty of options available on the market.

When designing that email card, consider your audience wisely, as well as the technical limitations of email. To see which email clients support what CSS, have a gander at the Email Standards Project web site.

Prefer to send something more substantial? There’s always the usual bottle of wine or gift hamper. Perhaps consider trying some branded promotional gear, such as USB flash drives with your logo, or similar.

Make sure though, that you either buy quality products or forget it. There’s nothing worse than spending all year building a reputation for quality, only to damage it by sending some cheap pen that never works, or has your logo printed badly on the side.

It’s unfortunate, but clients will remember it — more often than the times you worked all night to get a web site live for them.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 422 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.